I came to see that philosophy concerns the everyday, rather than cerebral, abstract esoterica. Philosophy is concrete and felt, the ground beneath and within everything we are and do. It and we deserve that it be so rendered.
“So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”
― The Living Mountain
― The Living Mountain
“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will come and seek you.”
―
―
“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.”
― The Peregrine
― The Peregrine
“Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.”
― The Living Mountain
― The Living Mountain
“Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.”
― The Living Mountain
― The Living Mountain
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